The Bickersteth Diaries: 1914-1918

PROLOGUE

There are two complete sets of the Bickersteth War Diary containing thousands of newspaper cuttings and some 7,000 typescript pages. Eleven fat cloth-bound volumes, some of them three inches thick, cover the First World War, its aftermath, and then various continental jour-neyings made by members of the family between the wars. The Second World War fills seven more, rather less bulky, volumes. Both sets belong to my brother, Ted Bickersteth, the elder son of the eldest son of the diarist. In 1988 he gave the first set, under a long loan arrangement, to Churchill College, Cambridge. They were very keen to have it, having been long encouraged to do so by the military historian, the late Stephen Roskill, who knew our family. My wife and I house the second set, simply because we have a little more room in our small house than my brother has in his even smaller one.

The diarist of all eighteen volumes was our grandmother, Ella Bickersteth. She was the only daughter of Sir Monier and Lady Monier-Williams of Oxford; he was then Professor of Sanskrit in the University. In 1881, Ella married Samuel Bickersteth, one of the sixteen children of Edward H. and Rosa Bickersteth; Edward was Bishop of Exeter from 1885–1900, after having been Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead, for thirty years. Sam and Ella had six sons. The growing family lived in vicarages in Belvedere and Lewisham in Kent, and then Leeds in Yorkshire where, with his ten curates, Sam was the incumbent at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. By then all the boys were grown up.

The eldest, Monier, a priest, had been married in 1911 to Kitty, one of the daughters of Canon and Mrs George Jelf, a Residentiary Canon of Rochester. Monier and Kitty became the parents of Sam and Ella’s first grandchild, another Ella, shortly before the war. Three more children, of which I was the youngest, were later born to them. By 1914 our father was Rector of Castle Bromwich, which was then in the country outside Birmingham.

The second son was Geoffrey. After Charterhouse and Oxford he taught at Marlborough, and then went out to Heidelberg to continue his academic studies. Later an internationally-known Dante scholar (he held the chair of English at Aberdeen University for 20 years), he had by 1914 published his first work on the Italian poets. But that July he ran it so fine getting out of Germany that all his books had to follow him home after war was declared, by a circuitous route through Switzerland.

Julian was Sam and Ella’s third son. Like his eldest brother, he too was a priest, trained, as Monier had been at Wells Theological College after Christ Church, Oxford. He then had a year in India. A curacy at Rugby (he knew the parish from having been a boy at Rugby School) led him to become Chaplain to Melbourne Grammar School in 1912. He soon made a mark there, among other innovations taking in 1913 the first-ever Australian boys cricket side touring abroad, to what was then Ceylon.

Burgon came next, named to his later mild annoyance after Dean Burgon of Chichester Cathedral, a distinguished Victorian ecclesiastic. He captained Charterhouse at Association Football, and went on to do the same for Oxford University. From there, immediately after taking his Finals in 1910, he crossed the Atlantic to answer a call from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. In February of that year they appealed in The Times for help, both lay and ordained, from England for the Canadian Church in its ministry to the hundreds of men flooding the western parishes to build the second railway line through the Rocky Mountains. Burgon had two adventurous years as a lay missionary there, publishing his letters home in a book he called ‘The Land of Open Doors’ in 1913. He then had a year in France at the Sorbonne (his French in consequence was always very good). He had just secured a post at the University of Alberta in Edmonton; so he was about to start work in Canada again, as the storm clouds gathered over Europe during the peerless days of that 1914 summer.

Morris, the fifth son, had gone out to stay for some months with his brother in Melbourne after coming down from Oxford. By midsummer 1914 he was on his way home, touring South Africa, and not at all sure what he was going to make his life’s work.

It was Ralph, the youngest, still only nineteen, who was the first of the brothers into uniform. At Oxford, like all his brothers, he had been at Christ Church (five of the six of them had the same rooms in succession from 1900–1914 – Peckwater Quad 5.6; my brother Ted had them in the 1930s; I in the 1940s; and two of our sons in the 1970s and ‘80s). Ralph belonged to the University Training Corps, and so found himself going to camp in his home district with the West Yorkshire Regiment on the very day that war was declared.

*     *     *

The Bickersteth War Diary began because Burgon, very soon in that August, urged his mother ‘to share with Julian, stuck out in Australia, these momentous happenings which are affecting all of us’. She agreed to do what she could, having no idea of course that she would be hard at it for four and a half years; still less that, encouraged in 1939 by her five surviving sons and by her grandchildren (including myself, I am reminded by an entry that September in Vol.1), she would take up her pen again at the age of eighty to do a similar task for the whole of the Second World War, in her, by then, greatly extended family.

The result of all the trouble she took may well be, as Burgon was later to write, ‘a unique account of how war affects an average English family’. ‘Middle-class’ ought properly to have been added as a qualifying factor. In 1988 when, for the first time, I began to read right through the Diary, I soon discovered what a very mixed bag it was. Much of what was there had lost the appeal it had had to the family and to friends, at the time. In particular, the seven volumes of the Second World War mostly made rather turgid reading; the diarist was after all over eighty when she collated the contents. I say this even though I contributed an account of my tiny part in the invasion of France in June 1944! There are also much more dramatic letters from my cousin Tony, who had a very dangerous war with the Gurkhas in Burma.

But it was the letters of the First World War from Julian and Burgon which stood out as being of commanding and still immensely vivid quality. I decided, on the advice of a London publisher friend, the late Jock Murray, to test the waters by sending a particularly moving excerpt to the Spectator. The editor rang at once to say he wanted to publish it complete, and not only did he do that but also at the end of that year (1991) included the whole passage in the Spectator Annual.

This success prompted me to go further, but on a limited scale to the extent on the one hand of only working on the first set of diaries, and on the other of singling out from everything else the contributions of the third and fourth brothers, Julian the padre and Burgon the cavalry officer; with the connecting thread of the diarist’s own writing.

So I started on my ruthless pruning to reduce three thousand pages to manageable proportions. The uncles’ long letters home, mostly written in pencil it must be remembered, (biros did not exist) and sometimes put together in extremely hazardous conditions, contain plenty of material emphasizing the boredom of army life in wartime, with only a little which brings out the excitements and the miseries of actual battle. I have felt it right to include enough of both elements to convey what I hope is a realistic balance. Certainly what they wrote makes it clear enough that there is no glamour and glory in war any more, if indeed there ever was. Only the triumph of the human spirit and the comradeship of shared experiences, funny or sad or just terrible, are good. Very evident also is the natural determination of the brothers to go on enjoying themselves despite everything – without that, they and millions like them would surely have been broken as the war dragged on.

But I resist further philosophizing. This is not my book. The uncles’ own soliloquys are in the text, eloquent still after nearly three generations.

I pay tribute to my wife Rosemary and a Canadian scholar, Norah Moorhead, for between them gallantly committing my messy manuscript to the typewriter, after which a computer-wise friend in the neighbourhood, Derek Phillips, tidied up the pages for the publisher.

Both personally, and as a family, we are most grateful to Lord Coggan and to John Terraine, for their perceptive and very different contributions; to three friends, David Edwards, Geoffrey Rose, and Cecil Humphery Smith for their help in the Epilogue; to Humphrey Stone for his meticulous design skills; and finally to Leo Cooper himself, whose readiness to publish the diary in the first place, and then his continued patient enthusiasm for the whole project has made several years’ work on it an infinitely worthwhile pleasure.

JOHN MONIER BICKERSTETH

EDITOR’S NOTE: I took the opportunity, when the paperback edition was published in Autumn 1996, to make a number of corrections to the hard-cover edition of a few months earlier. I am very grateful to the publishers for allowing me to do so again with this new hard-cover edition in Summer 1998

J.M.B.

VOLUME I

JULY 1914 – FEBRUARY 1915

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The outbreak of war – Burgon and Ralph join up – Julian is kept informed

of affairs at home and describes Australia’s growing commitment to

the war – an accident to Burgon delays his posting to France –

the Germans shell Scarborough.

Since 27 July, 1914, Canon and Mrs Bickersteth had been on holiday in the west country with two of their sons, Burgon and Geoffrey. The weather was perfect, but the international news increasingly bad.

They were in Exeter on Tuesday 4 August, staying at the Royal Clarence Hotel; the evening papers said that the war between England and Germany could not be delayed many hours. ‘Next morning’, wrote Burgon, Wednesday 5 August, ‘we opened our papers and found the great flaring words we expected, written right across the principal sheet War declared between England and Germany.’

‘It was impossible to suppress a sigh of relief. At any rate we had been true to our obligations. We were entering the great struggle with Germany under the best conditions, and in our heart of hearts we had not the least doubt about the successful issue of the war’. The party returned to Leeds at once.

On Monday 10 August Burgon went to London by train for an appointment with three University professors (from Canada), ‘who I knew were in the UK. They were most kind and said that they spoke for the President of the University when they said that I might certainly consider myself free from the contract to take up my work in Edmonton at the end of September, on the condition that there was a real need for men and that there was reasonable prospect of my being able to get to the Front. They also promised – which from my point of view was essential – that my post at the University of Alberta would be open to me whenever I applied for if.

Next morning he went to the headquarters of the Inns of Court Squadron in Lincoln’s Inn (he had been attached to the regiment while in the Cavalry of the Officers Training Corps at Oxford), signed on again and went through his medical ‘When the MO, who had been tipped the wink that my eyesight was not brilliant, examined me, he merely pointed to a large Oxo advertisement on the hoarding the other side of the road and, without batting an eyelid, asked me if I could read it. Yes, I answered, and read it straight off. Anyone half blind could have done so, but I was through, and thus took the King’s Shilling’.

The next fortnight he spent trying both in London and Yorkshire for an interpretership or a commission, but his attempts, despite string-pulling (including an interview with Sir Herbert Plumer¹, and with Lord Grey²) were not immediately successful. He reflects on the remarkable patriotism he was hearing in his news from Canada:

The Dominion Government is preparing to send a force of 20,000 men to Europe and maintain them in the field; if necessary, it will send 100,000. Double the number of men needed have volunteered. The Federal Government is also sending 1,000,000 bushels of wheat. Alberta is sending 500,000 bushels of oats. Winnipeg wishes to raise and equip a regiment. Ontario is giving money and wheat. Rich men are giving their yachts, or are raising and equipping regiments, or giving a battery of quick-firing guns.

On the morning of 13 August Burgon was walking with a friend across Horse Guards Parade, ‘which presented a most unusual appearance. In the middle were three large marquees – and a huge queue waiting to pass through the barriers into the tents, where the names of the men were taken; they were then medically examined. The crowd was large but orderly. Men in top-hats stood in the queue with rough working-men and seedy-looking clerks’.

On 22 August Burgon and his parents were week-end guests of the Archbishop of York³ at Bishopthorpe. Ralph was in camp with the West Yorkshire Regiment on York racecourse, ‘and we walked over to the camp. Ralph met us and showed us what there was to be seen. We all four went back to tea at Bishopthorpe, where several officers of Ralph’s battalion joined us. The Archbishop told Father (a Territorial Force chaplain and attached to the West Yorkshire Regiment) to bring as many officers as he liked to tea, and has given him leave to show the house to the Tommies. Accordingly Father showed over parties of fifty to one hundred every night. Father told me:

The Archbishop was quite in favour of my trying to get to the front, but he lost patience with those who had gone and should have remained at their posts at home, e.g., Dick Sheppard⁴, who was in charge of Grosvenor Chapel and has just been appointed to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Lady Dudley had begged him to come as Chaplain to the Field Hospital she was taking to Belgium, and Dick had accepted. Neville Talbot, who fortunately just happened to be free, having left his work at Balliol and not yet gone to India, has gone as Chaplain to his old regiment, the Rifle Brigade, with whom he served as an officer in the South African war. ‘He snorted like an old war horse when he donned his khaki once again’, said the Archbishop. Ted Talbot has also gone to the front as Chaplain. The Bishop of London’s announcement that he intended going with the London Rifle Brigade for six months, wherever they were ordered, was looked upon as a piece of rather dramatic playing to the gallery.’

*     *     *

The news of the recently-landed British Expeditionary Force was not good – they were having to retreat from Mons, and by 26 August 2,000 British casualties had been announced. ‘Our troops apparently fought magnificently against terrific odds’, the Diary records.

Morris was in South Africa when war was declared, having been going around the world for some months. He got a passage at once in the P&O liner Borda and arrived in England after exactly three weeks. ‘His voyage from the Cape had been highly exciting – there were no lights at night, and the horizon was anxiously scanned all day for the smoke of a German cruiser’.

Two days before Morris’ arrival, Burgon had seen a letter from Lord Helmsley in the Yorkshire Post ‘saying he had been authorized to raise a foreign service corps [ie. for service overseas] of the Yorkshire Hussars, and appealing to ex-yeomen and others used to riding and the management of horses, to enrol. I thought this looked as if it might do for me and decided to return to Leeds in the afternoon and possibly go over to Scarborough, their headquarters, the next day’.

I did exactly this and saw Lord Helmsley at the Grand Hotel. He was at first rather against gentlemen joining the ranks, but finally said that he did not see any real reason why I should not. It was quite possible that there might be other gentlemen joining, and in any case this was quite common in time of war’.

‘So on September 2nd’, begins the diarist, taking up the tale which Burgon had been writing till then:

Burgon went off to Malton to join the Yorkshire Hussars. We are all ourselves a little sorry that he has not managed to get a commission, but he himself seems quite happy to be a simple trooper. He is still perfectly free to accept either a military interpretership or a commission, should either be offered to him.

In his first letter as a private soldier, Burgon writes:

Yorkshire Hussars, A Squadron, Place Newton, Wintringham Nr. Malton. 6 September 1914.

My dear Mother,

I can now give you some little idea of life here. The first night I arrived all the men were sleeping in three marquees, so the crush was very great – we were like sardines. I was posted to a sergeant and a squadron temporarily – given a palliasse, which I filled with straw, a mackintosh sheet and a blanket. I slept tolerably well, finding a corner near two very decent fellows from Middlesboro’.

On Thursday morning we did rifle drill on foot – just the recruits. The trained men went out on horseback. Then shortly before dinner they brought their horses in and we had to ride them round in a circle, walking, trotting, etc., just to see if we could ride. After dinner we did more rifle drill and of course had to help at morning and evening stables – all old work for me. There was not much to do, as there were really as many recruits as trained men. Last night, however, about fifty more horses arrived from Scarboro’, and I and a few other recruits from A Squadron were told off to get a horse. I pitched on a fairly good animal – the choice had to be made in about three minutes, so it was difficult, but I think he will turn out all right if he is up to my weight; at any rate it is good to have a horse to look after. I also have a complete set of saddlery – which is lucky because we are really short of everything. On the whole they are a very good set of horses; numbers come from big estates round here – for instance, on Friday, Lord Furness sent about ten of his hunters, and ten of his grooms as troopers. They are typical small boys – all magnificent riders, but how they will mount these big horses quickly and with their rifles and accoutrements on, I don’t know. Furness is Master of the Bramham Moor, and they have sent some good horses, so our lines look well.

My relationship with the officers is rather amusing. Helmsley (who to the regiment of course is a very big man) came up one day outside the orderly tent and said, ‘Hello Bickersteth, you’ve turned up all right. How are you?’ And then I told him about the Inns of Court and we had quite a chat – rather to the astonishment of some of the men who were there. Still more amusing was Lascelles⁵ yesterday. He runs the machine-gun section and by the men is cordially hated. Indeed he always does seem rather the la-di-da-dy lord, effeminate and affected – and the average trooper in the regiment thinks him a d—d fool and says so, only in much stronger language. He is considered very standoffish and offensive. Last night when I was grooming my horse, up he comes and says, ‘Hello Bickersteth, very sporting of you to have joined. What sort of horse have you got?’. I jumped to the salute, which I think slightly disconcerted him, as the last time we met I was in a tail coat and top hat, and we lunched with the Harewoods in London. However, he really was very decent, as it was a much more difficult position for him than me. We had quite a long talk. All this much surprised the men and not a few of the officers …

We get morning and evening papers here, so are as well up with the news almost as you. I do hope the counter stroke, which surely must have been planned to cut off the German army, will soon be carried out. They are getting perilously near Paris. There are several of my Charterhouse contemporaries in the second list of officers’ casualties.

I write to you on the grass in our marquee – with all the sides down and a glorious view beyond the horse lines and the park – but a number of the men are gambling in one corner and others are singing and talking, so excuse the discursive character of this letter. Mrs Davidson⁶ writes that she and the Archbishop think I have done absolutely right. I do not think it is any good your coming over here. I have very little time – can show you no hospitality – nor is there any accommodation. I am extremely busy and very happy. I feel I am doing something in this crisis, if only in a humble way, and I think we have a good chance of getting abroad to France or Belgium or Germany sometime. I don’t think I shall take a commission.

Barely ten days after receiving that letter, Burgon’s mother and father and two brothers were going against his expressed wish of ‘No visiting’; maybe there had been some telephone conversations. At all events he gave them a great welcome that Saturday evening; his mother writes about it in almost holiday mood as a family-outing-to-see-their-soldier-son:

No more beautiful spot could be imagined than that selected for the encampment – grass, river and woodland with sheltering hills on every side. We drove up through the park grounds almost as far as the horse lines. Then Burgon conducted us through the camp, first of all showing us the horses, all of which are good – some of them being really valuable animals, commandeered from private stables or freely given by their owners. Burgon’s quarters and food are certainly rough in the extreme, but he did not seem to mind, and as they are there under war conditions nothing else was to be expected. The men among whom he is thrown he described as being of a thoroughly good sort, though certainly not remarkable for the refinement of their manners and language.

But his days in the ranks were numbered:

On Wednesday September 23rd (just three weeks since I had joined the Yorkshire Hussars in the camp at Wintringham) I was out as usual all the morning doing squadron drill. The regiment came in about noon and a telegram was put into my hands. It read:

War Office. Sept. 22nd, 1914

I am directed to inform you that you have been appointed to the 5th Cavalry Reserve Regiment quartered at York. You are to join for duty as soon as possible.

The orderly officer was just entering the tent to put the usual question ‘Any Complaints?’. I waited for him outside, saluted, and asked him to read the telegram; he did so, smiled, congratulated me and said he would take it up to Lord Helmsley who would be at lunch.

I felt certain I ought to take the commission, my only hesitation being, would the new job take me to the Front? Lord Helmsley felt I should accept. While we were talking, a grey taxi came dashing along over the park. Father jumped out, and walked towards us, beaming all over his face. He had in his hand the letter from the War Office. Still more important from my point of view was that he had’ phoned that morning from Leeds to Sir Herbert Plumer, who was delighted I had got the commission and said it meant getting to the Front with absolute certainty, after I had gone through the proper cavalry training.

That decided me, and while Father talked to Lord Helmsley, I rushed back to the tent to pack my kit. My saddlery, blankets and all other regimental kit I was ordered to hand over to my squadron Sergeant-Major; I walked into the Sergeants’ mess – in itself rather a bold act! – and asked for Sergeant-Major Roberts. He came out, surprised at being disturbed, and was still more so when I told him why I wanted him. The Regimental Sergeant-Major, who is a very important person and treats one as the dirt beneath his feet, rather altered his talk.

I packed my stuff, handed over saddlery etc., to Roberts, gave my tin mug and plate to someone who wanted to buy them, said goodbye to two or three pals, and was back within a quarter of an hour at the officers’ lines. Father and I said good-bye to Helmsley, got into the taxi and drove off. Thus ended somewhat suddenly my experiences as a trooper in the Yorkshire Hussars; they had lasted less than a month.

The end of September saw the inclusion in the diary of Julian’s first letter from Melbourne about the war:

Church of England Grammar School, Melbourne. Aug. 2 1914. I cannot say if this letter will ever reach you. The terrible news that has come through all too slowly from Europe in the last four days has filled everyone with anxiety.

Tonight we only know that Russia and France are both fighting Germany. This afternoon, although it was Sunday, the evening papers brought out extra editions, which were bought at three pence each. These contained the news of the declaration of war by Germany against Russia, that England was isolated from the continent and that Italy is asking to remain neutral.

The question on every one’s lips is ‘Will England join in?’ Most people seem to think that she will never get such another opportunity of smashing the German fleet, and it will give us a chance of crippling her commerce for generations. There are only, I believe, three old and nearly obsolete German Warships in the Pacific, which any one of the ships of the Australian fleet could completely destroy.

It is expected here that there will be a partial mobilisation of the troops in Australia, with the object of drafting them to India, so as to set free British regiments there which might be needed at home.

Monday, 3 August

I preached last night to a large crowd in Chapel on the war. Late editions of the evening papers came out far into the night. This morning the school assembled in a great state of excitement. As each edition came out, it was pinned on to the notice board and besieged by a struggling mass of boys. A boy appeared at the interval, carrying a rifle from his study to the armoury and was immediately cheered and cheered again. The opinion here is that Great Britain will have great difficulty in keeping herself neutral, and that if Germany refuses to respect Belgium’s neutrality, she will not wait but attack the German fleet at once.

4 August, 1914

At 1.30 p.m. the Headmaster posted an edition of the ‘Argus’ containing the news of the Declaration of War made by England against Germany. So the die is cast. Pray God we save our coasts from invasion!

I suppose now that we shall be cut off from direct communication by letter from Europe. Ordinary mail-boats will have to go very carefully to avoid capture. I do hope I shall get news from you.

Will Burgon delay his departure? Will Ralph volunteer? What will Geoffrey do? Where is Morris, and can he get home to England or will he try for a job in South Africa? You can well imagine how I long to be able to answer these questions. Separation will be difficult now as never before, but it will after all really be a very small thing to bear, compared to the hardships and trials of our sailors and soldiers, and I am well content to suffer even this little amount for my country.

Australia is mobilising 20,000 men on a war footing instantly. Today a German merchantship tried to escape out of Port Phillip Bay, but was brought back by having two shots fired across her bows from the Queenscliff Fort. This shot is supposed to be the first shot ever fired in warfare in Australia – quite an historic occasion.

18 August, 1914

The first contingent of the Expeditionary Force paraded some 2,000 strong at the Vidona Barracks in St Kilda Road, and marched through the city on their way to camp some twelve miles outside Melbourne. They were most of them in mufti, and a strange heterogeneous crowd they looked. The men were physically fit enough, the authorities having rigorously excluded all the weaklings of course, but also every man whose chest measurement was not over 34, or who had corns or defective teeth.

But this force seemed hardly disciplined enough to face German quick-firers. However, three weeks in camp, and uniforms and rifles will doubtless effect a great change, though I should say Australians would always be better at irregular work rather than a disciplined advance on a position.

The School was personally interested in this first contingent because it contained many Old Boys and two of our staff. A third member of the School, the School Captain, Billy Hughes, has also gone. I suppose he is universally admitted to be the finest captain of the School we have ever possessed here. He was to have entered Christ Church, Oxford, in October of this year. Feeling it his duty, and really for no other reason, he volunteered. There was a special assembly of the School called to bid him good-bye. He received a great ovation from the School, and made a manly speech in reply.

Burgon, meanwhile, still on leave, had got his officer’s uniform and put it on after dinner and was duly admired. The diarist writes:

It certainly suited him better than the trooper’s tunic, though we did not get quite all the straps right, and he is still without his cavalry sabre. But booted and spurred, he jingled down the stairs in a very martial and military manner. He went off to York by train in great state in a first-class compartment, looking very different indeed from Trooper Bickersteth of a few days ago.

A week later Burgon was writing home:

I think I shall much enjoy life here. If only (as everyone says) they push us through in two months, it will be splendid. Today we did a lot of riding without stirrups and soon began riding merely on blankets (no saddle). Eventually we jump like this! There is a great difference from the Yeomanry. Everything has to be done correctly, and done quickly or there is a row. Riding such as we have to do can only be described as exhausting, at any rate at this stage. One of the most tiring things we do is to receive the order to vault from the horse we are riding and to jump on to the one in front of us. To vault (without stirrups) on to a sixteen-hand horse is difficult, and to do it about a dozen times in the space of a quarter of an hour is tiring, especially when in between one has to ride the horse which one has never seen before, which may be extremely rough and difficult, with only a blanket on its back.

At 11.30 we go to stables. I have half a troop to look after, about sixteen men and horses. One walks up and down superintending every horse and man, asking questions, getting to know one’s own men, and at the proper times telling them to water, hay-up, feed, bed down etc.

He describes the rest of his hard-working day which is not over

till 7.00 when it is time to go to one’s rooms, shout for one’s servant (for all the world like Oxford and one’s scout) and have a hot bath and change, and return at 8.00 for Mess.

We have a very good dinner, five or six courses. Drinks of course for all meals are extra, and are expensive. For instance, port at dinner costs 1/-, whether one has one or six glasses. Messing account per day is 5/3. Tea 4d extra – share of messing expenses about 9d per day, often more. I think messing will be on average 7/- a day, if not 7/6.

Both my servants are good, especially my groom, Johnson, who is a groom in civilian life and takes tremendous care of one’s horse. My first servant or body-servant is Cameron, very Scotch [sic], anxious to please, but not trained at valeting. There is really very little for the first servant to do, and of course they take the job because it is a soft one. On the strength of it they get off all morning parades.

This morning there were four different Church Parades, two Presbyterian, one R.C. and one Church of England. I was ordered to go with C Squadron to the Church of England, and marched my men up to the appointed place after inspecting them! There were not more than 70 Church of England men altogether out of the whole barracks, so strong is the Presbyterian element.

The parson did not strike us as very attractive. The officers sat in the second row, and in front of us sat Plumer and his wife and daughter and a red-moustached A.D.C. The church was full because there were many infantrymen; (these of course, don’t count!!!).

One mid-October Sunday he writes:

This morning I went to the Minster. I was too tired to go early but stayed after the 10.30 service to the mid-day Celebration. The chancel was very full and the service beautiful, though I do not think the choir touches ours⁷. The only other officer who was at the Celebration was the Colonel, Lord Basing, and we went back to the barracks and lunched together. I liked him immensely. When we are all there he seems shy and reserved, but he talked away like anything with me about the war. He is of course very patriotic and not in the least pro-German, but as a soldier he has a profound admiration for the way in which the Germans are conducting the war. He does not hold that the secret preparations for war on their part were wrong. Any nation in their position would have done the same, and with regard to secret intelligence every nation is the same.

About this time a letter from Julian in Melbourne says:

Tonight we hear that New Zealand troops have taken Samoa, quite a useful little colony, and we expect soon to hear of the fall of German New Guinea.

The news from Northern France, however, is anything but reassuring. The Germans seem to be willing to sacrifice immense numbers of men in order to reach Paris. The British seem to have borne the brunt of the fighting. The casualty list must be enormous. It is strange to think of county cricket matches going on now, as if there was no European war going on.

A second expeditionary force is now being prepared here. 20,000 men are sailing in three weeks’ time, but many of these are not at all well trained; some have never had a rifle in their hands at all, and certainly can’t shoot. There has been considerable difficulty in making up the numbers – all of which shows how absolutely cut off we are here from the world.

The war fever lasted only a week or so, and we are now going to have a General Election next Saturday, whereas every other part of the Empire has sunk all political differences for the nonce. I think this shows not a lack of patriotism but an inability to realise the serious position in which the Empire would be placed if Germany defeated both France and Russia on land. Many of the volunteers who have joined the Expeditionary Force are mere boys – quite unfit to be pitted against trained German soldiery who, in spite of all their vile barbarities, seem to be wonderfully brave fighters.

I am supposing that Burgon will be leaving for Canada this week. I see in today’s paper that the Canadian Expeditionary Force has been delayed owing to the expected presence in the Atlantic of German cruisers. So he may have an exciting voyage.

Burgon realised that his brother must be sad at being cut off. In a note home on 21 October, he says:

Please send him on this scrap so that he may hear of me every week.

And then on quite another tack:

All cavalry regiments in future are to have bayonets as well as cavalry swords and carbines, so really we shall be armed to the teeth.

But always the urge to get to the scene of action is evident:

Yesterday a draft of twenty men and one subaltern was sent to the front. The men had a great send-off at York station, it being a Saturday afternoon. Drums and bagpipes accompanied them, and large crowds.

Julian’s letters were taking about six weeks:

Here we are a little disturbed because the departure of an Expeditionary Force has been postponed owing, it is said, to the presence of some of the German Pacific Fleet in Australian waters. How far this is a mere rumour and how far fact, no one but the authorities knows.

On Friday last, the Victorian contingent of the Australian Expeditionary Force had a ceremonial march through the streets. They certainly have come on tremendously with six weeks’ training; they were very steady and looked the picture of health and determination. The Light Horse seemed a thoroughly fine lot of men, though I was not over-impressed with the horses. They are taking 1,000 horses from Victoria alone, and all the troop-ships have given up large spaces on their main decks to horse-boxes. Five thousand men in all marched through the streets, and there were enormous crowds who displayed quiet enthusiasm.

Julian was certainly never far from Burgon’s thoughts (9th November):

I write you a short letter so that it may go out to Julian. I have been trying to keep him posted with more or less one letter a week.

There are over thirty subalterns here, and a list has today been put up of those ‘who should possess all necessary kit for active service’. I am not on this list; it is full of the younger men who mean to make the Army their profession, including three or four boys of only 18 to 19 who really have only just left school, but have had part of a year at Sandhurst. On the face of it, it seems that one’s experiences of knocking about, and the’ Varsity and so on, do not fit one for all the wear and tear of war, and the leading of men and the ability to make up one’s mind.

But then, more cheerfully:

I am hunting again tomorrow with the York and Ainsty which will be great fun.

*     *     *

The diarist records a speaker at the Leeds Parish Church Mothers’ Union telling of a chaplain at the front who says the French soldiers are ‘most impressed by the piety of the English soldiers’. The Frenchmen stand round bareheaded while our chaplains are holding a service:

In a hospital in Paris, the English and French were in two adjoining wards. The French were very much impressed by the English soldiers’ attitude to dying. One Frenchman said to his English nurse, ‘Your English soldiers are wonderful; when they are about to die they send at once for the chaplain and the barber, the chaplain for the needs of their souls, the barber that their bodies may appear before their Maker smart and trim as a soldier should be’.

Burgon had to go to hospital at this crucial stage of his training because of a horse’s kick. Out on exercise the horse in front of him suddenly let fly and caught his knee with its full force: The diarist writes:

He tumbled off and lay on the ground in great agony. A stretcher was sent for and he was taken in a taxi to the Military Hospital. He hopes nothing is broken, but cannot tell yet. Poor fellow! The disappointment is keen because any injury to the knee must take some time and will quite prevent his going to the Front for many weeks, which is the one thing he has been living for.

Next day, his mother visits him in hospital:

I found Burgon very brave but desperately disappointed.

Burgon himself writes on 23 November that there is not much progress yet. He does not sleep well, nor has ‘a sleeping draught’ made much difference ‘so far’.

He writes to his mother a week later:

I confess to feeling thoroughly depressed today. There has been a sudden clearance of subalterns at the barracks; eight are leaving this afternoon, and that brings me third on the list for General Service, which practically means 1st, 2nd or 3rd Life Guards. I think there can be little doubt that had I been fit, I should now have gone any time within the next three or four weeks, very possibly sooner, almost certainly before Christmas. It is however equally possible that this accident will completely prevent me from being able to take my turn. However, there is no knowing, and I must look on the best side of things. You will have me home for Christmas now, which you would not have done before.

It certainly seems curious one should be laid aside just now. On reviewing my life pretty carefully I can think of no period in it (with the exception of the weeks leading up to the’ Varsity match in the year of my captaincy) when I would more than now have given worlds to be absolutely and entirely fit; and until this thing happened, I had been so extraordinarily well.

Meanwhile Julian’s comments on the Australian scene continue unabated:

Of the patriotism among the better classes there is no doubt whatsoever, but the working classes, who form of course the great majority here, are too much inclined to think of their